A story on GameSpot details the problems two dark-skinned site employees had with Microsoft’s Kinect, the just-released, controller-free add-on for the Xbox 360.

According to the site, the two employees in question had problems with Kinect’s facial recognition abilities. One GameSpoter’s face was recognized “inconsistently,” while when it came to the face of the other staffer, Kinect was “never able to properly identify the other despite repeated calibration attempts.”

To make it even more confounding, Kinect had “no problems” recognizing the face of a third dark-skinned employee. No hurdles were reported with Kinect’s skeletal tracking system for any of the employees, which is good, as it is the primary means of controlling on-screen action.

The problem may or may not be that big of a deal however, as GameSpot wrote:

The system's inability to recognize a user only means that he or she would need to sign in manually and some games' features may not work properly as a result. For example, when a second player joins in to Kinect Adventures during the title's drop-in, drop-out multiplayer, the system can't bring up that player's proper in-game avatar automatically if it can't identify the new user first.

Anyone remember the show, Better Off Ted? There was an episode where the company wired all the technology in the building (lights, doors, elevators, water fountains) to facial recognition cameras, to save money. But the cameras wouldn't recognize black people. Lights would shut off on them when white people left the room, they got trapped in rooms and elevators by the automatic doors, couldn't get a drink, etc. The company eventually hired white people to follow the black employees around to activate things for them, and put in a separate water fountain for blacks (it was more hilarious than it sounds).

I knew this issue ever since MS bought the company that invented the camera... (I was named Z Cam or something like that), there was reports of black (not just dark skinned) journalists not getting even skeletal tracking to work.
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Maurício Gomes
twitter.com/agfgames

As I and another poster mentioned, virutally every face recognition device on the market has problems like this. Some can't track black faces, some can't pick white faces out in bright light or against a light background, some think asians have their eyes closed. The biggest consumer victory I've heard of over the fact is a refund of the price difference down to a comparable modle without blink detection.

As for the other poster, a wheelchair bound or obese person can collect if a theme park doesn't have accessability ramps for them to get in. They can't collect because they're physically or medically unable to go on the rides.

This would imply that most class action lawsuites are designed in the interest of the class, and not to profit the firm bringing it to court. Last I checked, in North America, class action lawsuites are generally filed when the is a high enough statistical chance of some form of judgement or ruling, not when it is a fair lawsuite.

If anyone's going to sue I'd expect it to be those who are entirely prevented from using the device. Like people who need wheelchairs. Or people who are too out of shape (read "morbidly obese") to play for more than a minute.

This is kind of a recurring problem with this kind of tech it seems. My camera has face recognition, and it's very inconsistent with dark skinned subjects - sometimes even a deep tan will throw it off. I've seen pictures online showing how cameras with blink detection will occasionally detect asian faces as blinking.

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PHX Corp: I launched my spotify account today, and I kinda went a little overboard with adding music03/31/2015 - 3:59pm

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Sora-Chan: Wikipedia has rarely let me down on matters like this. But yeah... AC needs a break.. like two.. or three... or eight years.03/31/2015 - 2:51pm

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Daniel Lewis: I think ubisoft should give AC a break before it's milked to death,and i'm a big fan of the games03/31/2015 - 1:15pm

Daniel Lewis: The only thing said i disagree with is the final quote on Men's experiences are seen to be universal but women are gendered,though doesn't anita say that games with male protagonists are male power fantasies,so in turn both are gendered03/31/2015 - 1:08pm

Daniel Lewis: i found the video to be much better than any of the TvW series and it's about time the positive women are put in the spotlight03/31/2015 - 1:06pm

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james_fudge: Conster: the larger issue is that Ind. does not protect LGBTQ+ people under state law03/31/2015 - 12:11pm

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Conster: Apparently Pence intends to amend SB101 so denying service isn't allowed - without explicitly protecting LGBT+ and while still allowing the many other things you can get away with now if it's motivated by your religious beliefs.03/31/2015 - 11:53am

MaskedPixelante: http://mynintendonews.com/2015/03/30/rumour-nintendo-direct-on-april-1st/ A supposed full leak of tomorrow's Nintendo Direct, so you can all laugh and laugh about how wrong it is.03/31/2015 - 11:35am

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Michael Chandra: Argh. Anyway, I'm glad that move was made. Wonder if it counts, can he just declare it like that? 03/31/2015 - 9:27am